PRESS ARCHIVE
TV Guide - February 28th - March 6th, 1998
What with dancing babies, coed bathrooms and "size" matters, it's no wonder Ally McBeal had emerged as the hippest, hottest show on TV.


It's an uncontestable fact: In real life, none of the four female stars of Ally McBeal, Fox’s quirky love-it-or-hate-it new hit, are married. But the three leading men are.


"I think it’s because these particular four women are too smart, too beautiful.


"We just intimidate everybody," says Calista Flockhart, who plays the title character with a beguiling combination of gamine wistfulness and simmering feminism. She pauses for a moment. "That was a joke," she explains, then expresses concern that once in print, "it won’t sound like a joke."


If Flockhart, starring in her first TV series, sounds surprisingly battle weary, like her words have long been misinterpreted by the press, it may be because Ally McBeal (Mondays, 9 P.M./ET) has become a true breakout show since its September debut, blessed with the kind of high-energy buzz that percolates the watercooler and only attaches itself to a rare number of hits. Think Friends in its early days. Or ER. And like the casts of those ensemble-driven shows, Flockhart and her talented colleagues are now coming under the kind of journalistic scrutiny that translates into magazine covers, newspaper stories and even that newest media imprimatur of hitdom: more than a dozen fan-driven sites on the World Wide Web. Hence, Flockhart’s worry that her quotes won’t be clear.


Factor in recent Golden Globe wins for Flockhart as actress and for the show as best comedy series, and the star’s studied way with an interview begins to make sense, particularly when cast members are now forced to field questions about everything from the bizarre, computer-created dancing baby in an episoide dealing with Ally’s biological clock, to their real-life dating (for the women) and mating (for the men) habits.


And as the show’s ratings climb, reaching into the top 30 last month, creator David E. Kelley and the cast also find themselves on the defensive in much more cosmic debates on what Ally McBeal says about working women and corporate culture in the 1990s. “Sometimes a character can be professionally very strong and capable, but emotionally weak,” Kelley says. “Ally is very, very honest and straightforward. Sometimes to her own fault.” Says Flockhart: “For me, anything that produces controversy and thought and argument is doing its job. It’s waking people up to have a debate.”


But Kelley and Flockhart are the first to downplay any notions that he is somehow trying to capture and represent womankind – or even a man’s interpretation of it. “I am not inviting people to compare their lives with her. If they do, they will be offended. She does some outrageous things, tasteless things, sometimes heroic things.” Kelley also downplays the much-remarked upon fact that a man is writing a show so dominated by women. “To me the dirty little secret is I don’t draw any distinctions. I just don’t write them less than men.”


With moderate ratings successes like Chicago Hope and the Emmy-winning Picket Fences, and the critically acclaimed The Practice on his résumé, a hit like Ally McBeal is a whole new order. “We have certainly gotten much more attention for this show faster than the other shows,” Kelley says. It was almost a year ago that Fox challenged him to crate a post-Melrose Place hour, one that would appeal to young women, ages 18-34, against the predominately male audience of Monday Night Football. Fox executives had given him only the vague notion that they wanted a show to capture power-hungry young execs. What Kelley brought back, of course, was much different. While the show does feature a male law partner’s zeal to earn a Midas-size paycheck, that is merely background to the spotlighted saga of a young professional woman’s life and anxieties; Fox executives were more than pleased.


“This was a show where you say, ‘Let it ride. Just let it go,’” says Peter Roth, president of Fox Entertainment Group. (Programmers are now being pitched variations on Ally McBeal, and the WB has already ordered one, Felicity, that is described as Ally McBeal in college.)


The network also committed extra promotion dollars for an unlikely audience: men. Promos featureing beer-swigging guys who look toward a TV set and ask, “All right, is she on?” helped lure male viewers after Monday Night Football ended its run for the season.


Those viewers would probably smile to see Flockhart rehearse a scene in which Ally walks into old flame Billy Thomas’s office and has to comment on the Bronco’s recent Super Bowl victory. “You think John Ellroy will quit now that he’s got a Super Bowl ring?” Flockhart asks. After several tries at this, Gil Bellows and Courtney Thorne-Smith have to break the news to Flockhart. It’s John Elway who is the Broncos’ QB, not John Ellroy. “Have I been saying John Ellroy all along?” Flockhart asks with a sheepish grin.


Cast members insist that little has changed since the show’s following grew from cult to mainstream status: They still work 14-hours days and do little but rest on the weekends. A recent cast jaunt was to Bellows’ house for a Saturday-night dinner party.


Only during the Christmas break, when Flockhart went with her parents to Hawaii, did she notice the stares. “That was the first time I realized that the show had become a lot bigger than I,” she says.


So big that all of the cast members have hired personal publicists. And many are entertaining movie offers during the show’s summer break. Of course, it comes as no surprise that most of the heat has surrounded Flockhart. “My focus is on the part and doing the best job I can with my acting,” she says. “I’ve really remained impervious to the rest of it.”


The performers talk about having to remind themselves to keep the focus on the work, not the media blitz. “We all look out for each other more,” says Jane Krakowski, who plays Elaine Vassal, the all-knowing secretary. “We’re all tighter. And that’s a great feeling.”


Says Thorne-Smith: “We keep talking so the media buzz doesn’t create a conflict among us. From Melrose Place, I learned that the media picks people to focus on and shifts them continuously.”


What seems to hit home with the actors is Kelley’s writing and how he manages to glean what is on their minds, sometimes even coincidentally. Peter MacNicol plays the bagpipes; now his character John Cage plays the bagpipes. Krakowski once hung out on the set smoking cigars with some of the producers. “On the next episode, Elaine was smoking cigars with the boys,” she says.


Even Flockhart, who sees her role as just that – a role – concedes that there are instances where she can see herself in her character. “He knows us in a way,” Flockhart says of Kelley. “So he can instinctively come up with things that he knows would be going on. I don’t think that he necessarily has spies, or I don’t think he bugs the rooms, but he is prescient. He has really good instincts.”


That’s not to suggest that he consciously set out to choose four single females. “I know,” Lisa Nicole Carson says when reminded of this single fact. “It is probably being in this business. It is really demanding. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of dedication. It is almost like being married. And we are all picky.”


“The characters are very independent women,” says Thorne-Smith. “The actresses chosen are also very independent. That’s all I can think.”


Back on the set, a discovery is made. Flockhart was supposed to say John Ellroy, in keeping with her sometimes fumbling character. So on the next take, Flockhart says Ellroy again. This time, everyone’s in on the joke.


Calista Flockhart

So how’s this 33-year-old from Freeport, Illinois, an experienced stage actress, handling instant fame? “I can’t answer that question, because I don’t feel that. I think that’s other people’s perception, and they project it on me.” Flockhart stays close to her Hollywood home on weekends, taking trips to the dog park with Webster, a terrier mix. When the show takes its summer break, she may do a feature (her role as a heroin addict in the as-yet-unreleased independent feature “Pictures of Baby Jane Doe” is quite a departure from Ally), or she may return to the stage.


Gil Bellows

Does size matter? Ever since Billy Thomas asked that question in a now infamous episode, “Women have shared their philosophies and preferences with me,” says Gil Bellows, 30. His conclusion: “Everything matters.” A Vancouver native married to actress Rya Kihlstedt (who’ll appear with Peter Gallagher and Leonard Nimoy in NBC’s upcoming Brave New World), Bellows is impressed by his female costars. Consider how he sizes up the women’s single lives: “I sometimes sit and look at these four women and shake my head. In my single life I would have chased every single one of them at some point.”


Courtney Thorne-Smith
Slipping overnight from the role of Alison Parker on Melrose Place to Georgia Thomas on Ally McBeal, Thorne-Smith sees the initial confusion from fans: “People still come up to me and say, ‘Are you going to get carjacked or something like that?’” A native of the San Francisco Bay area, the 30-year-old actress is the sole regular cast member to have already experienced instant stardom, although she and her castmates haven’t been engaged in serious chats about fame these days. “They really come to me for logistical things – photo shoots, or what to wear to an awards show.”


Lisa Nicole Carson

Thanks to Ally, Lisa Nicole Carson, 28, who plays roommate Renee Radick, says she’s “turning into an L.A. person.” A promising New York stage career led to roles in such critically acclaimed films as “Eve’s Bayou,” as well as a recurring bit on ER as Carla Reese, who had a baby with Dr. Peter Benton (Eriq La Salle). Born in Brooklyn, Carson is determined to share this latest career milestone with her family – convincing her younger brother and older sister to move to L.A. “I’m now working on my older brother in Atlanta.”


Greg Germann

His character lusts for “piles and piles of money.” These days, Greg Germann, 34, who plays Richard Fish, will be please with just a pile. He’s still adding up the bills from directing “Peter’s Garden,” a short independent film about a father and daughter working out their troubled relationship. The film was shot in the off-time between the Ally pilot last spring and production on the series in late summer. Busy as he was, there was a good omen waiting for him at home: “The night the pilot wrapped, I get home to find about 100 candles lit,” says the Houston native. “That was the night my wife [actress Christine Mourad] said she was pregnant.” Their son, Asa August, was born in December.


Peter MacNicol
Peter MacNicol plays one of the most eccentric characters in prime time, lawyer John Cage. His description of Cage: “Beehive brain… There’s all this buzzing going on in there,” says the 43-year-old actor from Dallas. “He has all this commotion of ideas.” With credits ranging from “Sophie’s Choice” to Chicago Hope, MacNicol, whose wife, Marsue, is a producer, uses unique techniques to prepare for a role. To get into Cage’s mind-set, he listens to CDs of yodelers. He has no easy explanation: “It would make no sense.” For fun, MacNicol likes to play the bagpipes, although “it’s hard to find a place to practice.”


Jane Krakowski

Jane Krakowski explains how she slips into character as Elaine Vassal, Ally’s vivacious, busybody secretary: “Start with too much, then add more!... People actually stop me on the street and say they have Elaines in their office,” she says. “I say ‘Wow! That’s scary.’” A New Jersey native who’s been acting since the age of nine, Krakowski, 29, already knew Calista Flockhart, the Rutgers college roomie of Krakowski’s best friend. “It’s bizarre to come full circle,” she says. “Now I get her coffee on national TV.”


Vonda Shepard

David E. Kelley and wife Michelle Pfeiffer had been fans and, in Pfeiffer’s case, friends of Vonda Shepard’s for years. After her performance last February at Billboard Live, a club in L.A., Kelley called to ask if she wanted to be “involved in the music on a new series.” Now the 34-year-old musician, who grew up in Encino, California, performs regularly on the show. She will release an Ally McBeal soundtrack; a new solo album is in the works. And there’s one instrument she would like to use in a future recording: bagpipes. Vonda, meet Peter MacNicol.


– Ted Johnson, with Daniel Howard Cerone and Stephanie Williams




IT’S MY POTTY


TV’s first unisex bathroom sends the last bastion of privacy down the drain


The design request for a bathroom set for the law firm of Cage/Fish & Associates was simple: five stalls, don’t worry about gender.


Creator and executive producer David E. Kelley says he wanted a unique meeting spot for the characters, “plus I was intrigued by the nation that Fish [Greg Germann] would have a unisex bathroom.”


Functionally, it was designed with one purpose in mind: to provide for some of the show’s most revealing conversations and awkward chance encounters. “Of course, it is perverse and unique,” says production designer Peter Politanoff. “But we approached it in a serious fashion, playing it deadpan and letting David add humor.”


Politanoff sketched the bathroom one evening, ruling out the idea of urinals in favor of stalls. Instead of vanity wall units, there are two rows of sinks located in the center of the bathroom and divided by a set of round mirrors. “That was the hardest part, to basically get the movement in the bathroom,” he says. “You had to have that interaction going on.”


The decor is neutral: lavender-gray walls and tiles, stainless steel, halogen lightings, modernist paintings. The closest thing to a feminine touch is a pink silk rose on the vanity. “That’s basically to take the edge off the idea that you are sharing the bathroom with the opposite sex,” he says.


Politanoff did leave room for one gender distinction: The bathroom has both men’s and women’s doors. “In confrontational scenes with Billy and Ally,” he says, “it allows them to go out in a huff.”


For the record, the Hollywood set of Ally McBeal does not have a unisex bathroom, to the relief of Calista Flockhart. “If I were in a workplace that had a unisex bathroom, you wouldn’t catch me dead in it.” – Ted Johnson




CANNON’S LAW


As the smart, sexy Whipper, the screen siren defies Hollywood’s rules about older women.


Dyan Cannon is having a Whipper kind of moment.


As fans of Ally McBeal know, even shrouded in judge’s robes, the 59-year-old Botticelli-haired actress exudes a can’t-miss-it sex appeal and deadly comic timing – as well as that neck – that sends the 28-year-old Richard Fish (Greg Germann) swooning.


As Cannon, seated in her home in skintight jeans amid a boudoir’s worth of scented candles, discusses her May-December romance on the hit Fox series, the line between role and actor blurs. “Women have followed me into the ladies’ room to tell me they love it that I’m going with a younger man!” says the actress, emitting one of her trademark shrieking laughs. “Whipper’s really hit a chord.”


She recounts having the show’s co-executive producer Jeffrey Kramer tell her, “‘You’re going to have lots of younger boyfriends after this.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, going to have?’ Please!”


This bona fide Hollywood star, who has been playing her brand of bombshell for almost four decades, notes, “If a woman is over 40 in this town, she isn’t allowed to be sexy and smart, but I will not come under that. In fact,” kids the most famous of Cary Grant’s ex-wives, who also happens to have three Oscar nominations and a slew of hit comedies to her credit, “I’m immortal, and they better get that right now.”


Immortal may be a bit of a stretch, but at an age when most actresses are checking their SAG pension plans, Cannon is more than holding her own as the Older Woman on one of prime time’s youngest, hippest shows. She’s earning some of the best reviews of her career as the offbeat Judge Cone, who thinks nothing of having sexual liaisons in a men’s room or kneeing her lover in the groin for fondling Attorney General Janet Reno’s wattle.


Like Whipper, a character who has been described as a wacko off the bench and a stickler on it, Cannon is known both as a consummate professional and a genuine iconoclast, who has frequently interrupted her acting career to pursue everything from directing to self-help therapies. A quick scan of her Los Angeles apartment, which she rented two years ago after the breakup of her last relationship, reveals her talismans: candles and soft music, a massive leather Bible and wooden cross, L.A. Lakers posters tacked to the kitchen walls (Cannon is a fixture at home games) and a gym’s worth of exercise equipment where the dining room would normally be.


When Cannon glides into the room looking as taut as a 16-year-old, bearing a silver platter of hot homemade banana muffins – “my own recipe” – and talking about football playoffs and her Bible study group, you realize you don’t so much converse with the actress as enter her world.


“Dyan is one of the great women in Hollywood,” says costar Germann. “Not only is she one of the funniest and best actresses, but she is truly a nice person. She bakes brownies for the crew, and when my wife was about to have our first child, Dyan gave us her Lakers courtside seats for one of our last evenings out.”


In fact, it was Cannon’s talent for blending amiable eccentricity with surefire sensuality that landed her a berth on Ally McBeal. Initially hired for one episode, Cannon quickly propelled her Whipper into becoming a regular. She has been such a standout that when series creator David E. Kelley’s second show about Boston lawyers, ABC’s The Practice, moved to Monday nights last month, Whipper showed up. “When we started looking for our older woman for Fish,” says Kramer, “we wanted someone who was sexy, strong, but vulnerable. Boy, did we get lucky.”


Cannon, who guest-starred on several series in the early ’60s (Malibu Run, 77 Sunset Strip), resisted playing a judge until she read the script: “I love that she’s smart, but I also love that she shows the hurt. There’s a lot you go through as an older woman that we need to learn to applaud instead of downgrade.”


While Cannon gives much of the credit to Kelley – “he has such a clear-cut picture of womanhood, I sometimes wonder how he knows all this” – she also draws on her own life to play Whipper. So far, she’s had quite a ride: from high school beauty queen (Miss West Seattle) to Hollywood wife (she was married to Grant, 35 years her senior, from 1965 to 1968 and is the mother of his only child, actress Jennifer Grant, 31) to stardom.


She won Oscar nominations for “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” (1969) and “Heaven Can Wait” (1978), plus one for directing a 1975 short film. But after 1990’s “The End of Innocence” – a feature she wrote, directed and starred in – failed, she took another hiatus: “I was here, I was there, I was married, I was divorced.” Two years ago, she rebounded with three films, including “Out to Sea” with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, and now, Ally McBeal.


The secret to her success? “God,” she says quietly, referring to her daily Bible study. “Of course,” she adds, sounding very much like Whipper, “if I had known how much sex and violence there was in the Bible, I would have started studying it years ago.” – Hilary de Vries




ALLY McBEAL: I’M CRAZY ABOUT IT


How can you resist someone who tosses her latest bridesmaid dress into the fireplace and uses the symbolic pyre to toast marshmallows? Burn, baby, burn.


Yet she’ll also plink the plaintive “Goodnight My Someone” on the piano to express her unquenchable romanticism. Yearn, baby, yearn.


Ally McBeal may be fed up, but she’s still hungry. For love, life, even a little respect. And we who adore and debate her can hardly wait to devour her next exasperating misadventure.


“How did I get to be such a mess so soon in my life?” she wonders aloud after nearly getting disbarred for too many overt displays of willful quirkiness. “You’ve always been ahead of your time,” her still-smitten ex-lover, Billy, consoles her.


Truth is, Ally McBeal is a show and a heroine very much of our time: ironic yet confused, wacky and wistful, self-absorbed and over-stimulated, deserving of a swift kick (see adjoining column) but also of a fierce hug.


If only she would let us embrace her. “You have such a knack for ruling people out,” her fabulous roommate Renee laments in observing the tattered fabric of Ally’s personal life.


Such a cutie, such a challenge is Ally, such a contradictory handful of brains and beauty, of compulsive impulsiveness and coy insecurity. In other words, such a startling original.


And she’s hardly on her own in that regard. Consider the odd couple that runs her law firm: Richard Fish, the most appealing amoral cad since J.R. Ewing, and his endearingly eccentric partner John “the Biscuit” Cage, who appear to fly over the cuckoo’s nest in every case he tries.


If I’m cuckoo for Ally and Ally, can you blame me? I’m bewitched because she’s bewildered. If she ever figures things out, we’d all have cause to be (in the words of the Biscuit) troubled. – Matt Roush



ALLY McBEAL: IT DRIVES ME CRAZY


Call me snappish. (Elaine, that insufferably intrusive secretary, surely would.) But like the insistent inner voice that taunts its title character, mine won’t let me simply sit back and admire Ally McBeal for its style and its cast. Not when so much about the show is so indulgent and irritating, you can’t help but groan and scream at the TV.


To borrow a recent McBeal-ism, think of this as the “ick” factor.


Would you ever hire a counselor-at-law who’s so clearly in need of counseling, who babbles so incoherently, who dresses so skimpily, who stumbles and fumbles like a designer rag doll? Even if you hang on her every word and thought, it’s hard to believe her for a second.


And while I’ve been a fan of writer-producer David E. Kelley’s ever since he contrived a shocking fall down an elevator shaft for L.A. Law’s Rosalind Shays, his absurdist penchant for preciousness hits an all-time low, straining to create a Seinfeld-ian lexicon (the wattle fetish, the “penguin” sexual prank) and never knowing when to say enough, whether with fantasy or whimsy. Loved the dancing baby. Hated the dancing Ally, outside in her PJs.


On to those names: A judge called “Whipper” is bad enough, but a lawyer who goes by Caroline Poop? (Played by Sandra Bernhard, no less.) And whatever your take on that unisex bathroom, I was dismayed when the Biscuit emerged from a stall not wearing pants. Why copy the least appealing quirk of Mandy Patinkin’s character from Kelley’s Chicago Hope?


From the first episode, when Ally compared the law to love by saying “the actual practice can give you a yeast infection” – ick! – I had a sinking feeling she represents a male wish-fulfillment fantasy of how a conflicted career woman walks, talks and sips cappuccino.


The result: For every intoxicating moment, there’s another that’s just insulting. Fish would say, “Bygones.” I’m not so sure. – Matt Roush
Date of this item added :
2007-09-02